


Reunion

by centuries



Category: Austin & Murry-O'Keefe Families - Madeleine L'Engle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-22
Updated: 2010-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-13 23:29:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/142885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/centuries/pseuds/centuries
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Treat!</p>
    </blockquote>





	Reunion

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CheshirePrime](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CheshirePrime/gifts).



> Treat!

It is the day of the Big Game and Vicky has followed her dorm mates across the bay to Berkeley. She has no idea what to expect and has barely been to the city, as it is, and she is supposed to dislike it, naturally, because she is a Stanford freshman and Berkeley has the axe this year. Or something. She is wearing a crisp cardinal tshirt and her favorite pair of jeans and this is entire trip is more more pleasant since she borrowed a ride from Lexie’s senior boyfriend with a car rather than took Caltrain and BART for a 2 hour trip. Much more enjoyable.

She hasn’t heard from Adam in awhile. She had high school to finish and he has spent all of his breaks in exotic places, traveling to South Carolina for follow up research with Professor O’Keefe, who was now tenured at the University of South Carolina and working on a NSF grant on some sort of invertebrates, and she realizes she has no idea if Adam plans on working on a PhD there or something. She has had an awfully hard time keeping in touch with everything that has happened, and hasn’t happened. She misses him though. He understood her, he liked her, a lot, but sometimes, that wasn’t enough.

She has no idea why she is actually going to a football game. She did not want to follow Adam to college per se, but she wanted to try the West Coast, though she was not in love with Palo Alto and its distance from the actual city and the feel it had. She had loved New York and its opposite, Antarctica, but she is not in love with the in-between. Maybe she should transfer, she thinks, though now it is too late in the fall to do such a thing.

She walks up Memorial Glade on the Berkeley campus on a quick tour, noting the library and is not paying much attention when she hears someone calling her name. She looks sharply to her left, towards the main library, where she sees someone familiar. He is simply standing there, and it is too hard to tell if he is smiling or laughing or otherwise amused but she knows it is him. “Adam!” she calls back, and mumbles something to her companions about an old friend and what not, because that is all he really is, and runs up to greet him, where he is standing with a backpack slung over his shoulder and a book in hand.

“Were you going to the game?” he asks, and by the way he does so in past tense, it makes her think she has already given up on the idea.

“I was, yes, headed there,” she replies softly, watching him. “But I have time to talk,” she adds.

“Oh good,” he tells her back, smiling now. “How have you been? I heard you were at Stanford,” he adds, making light of the fact he knew she was in the area but wasn’t rushing to seek her out, and she is sorely tempted to bring that up. She is about to say something to that effect, when he continues, “but I wasn’t sure what to say, after how we left things.”

How we left things was such: Vicky returns from Antarctica cold and in his arms, he kisses her briefly, seems to regret it immediately and then spends too much time avoiding her the entire flight back to home, where upon he returns to California and she is forced to go back to her old, real life and nothing is as exciting and frantic as it ever was with Adam.

Vicky was terribly disappointed in him in a way, but she missed him more. Somehow she ends up in the library with him, sitting across from him as he tells her things about life and what he wants to do but she only catches it in brief flashes and is overwhelmed by his presence. She still likes him, she thinks, and watches how he moves and the fluidity of his movements and what it would be like to touch him. After thirty or so minutes of conversation, which she participates in as well, filling him in on everything and wanting to sound so exciting, to compete in a way, he asks if she wants to get something to eat, which she does, but she thinks of her friends and realizes she no longer has any interest in football. He proposes a restaurant off of Euclid, so if she wants, she can always head back to the game, and he goes to it all the time because it is by his apartment. He has treats and coffee back at his apartment, too, if she wants to warm up before going over to the game. He is still acting like she has a desire to leave him, which is very ridiculous indeed.

They eat quickly and she asks to see something or other from his trip, asks if he still has his jacket with the research group logo they made upon returning as a joke. He says of course, so they head back to his place and he starts a pot of coffee and offers her some sad cookies from Trader Joe's that have apparently been lying forgotten under a series of books from the biology library, ones he sneaks into VLSB. She remembers and notes these random tangents because he is getting very nervous and starting to feel very interested in Adam, who is far more attractive and interesting than she let herself remember.

She is sitting on his couch when he brings the coffee over and pours sugar and cream in without asking but she is glad, perhaps he remembers she likes it that way. He sits on a chair abutting the couch but not on the couch itself, so she slides next to the chair, as close as she can, pretending she is having difficulty hearing the conversation or that part of the room is drafty, or something. She is starting to feel heady and listless with these white lies, but she is now so close to him. She asks if he lives with a roommate, and he replies, yes, his room is the one on the lefthand side, but it isn’t very interesting. She says she wants to see it anyways, makes a comment about how you can tell a lot about someone by how they keep their room, so they leave the living room and end up in his bedroom. He has a lot of pictures on his walls, of places he has visited and where he is worked and there is one of her, kind of, she is in the picture and not the focus and he catches her looking at it much too long.

She hasn’t really liked another boy, it hasn’t even been that long since she has seen him, though she does wonder if he’s slept with anyone or if he’s loved someone else in-between, if she was just a prelude to another girl, another adventure. She is still staring at herself, at her big fluffy coat, at her smile as she is staring off in the distance, the landscape the main concern.

“I love that picture,” he says, and she is about to correct him, to say it's only me, that it can’t be that fantastic, but he is standing next to her and she feels like kissing him, so she does. With the slight height difference, it isn’t particularly comfortable, so they relocate, with a bit of a tangle to the bed. There are far more interesting things than football here.


End file.
